Abstract

The London Agency System in English Banking, 1780-1825. lAIN S. BLACK Over the last decade there has been a growing volume of debate concerning the geography of the English economy during the early industrial period.! Such debate has begun to revitalise the study of regional historical geographies and both conceptual and empirical work has examined the regional basis of change in England's industrial revolution. Hudson, for example, has consistently argued for the importance of a regional perspective in the analysis of industrialisation in Britain which, she claims, was located within a series of regional transformations.2 Further, she argues that much recent macro-economic work on national change has failed to disclose many of the most significant features of this social and economic transformation, precisely because they were regional in nature. Her persuasive argument for the region as the basic conceptual unit in the study of industrialisation has been reflected in the recovery of a wide range of intra-regional production systems, social practices and credit networks.3 However, an important outcome of the debate on the production and integration of regions in early industrial England, in the Journal of Historical Geography, has been a renewed emphasis on the importance of flows -